Spring Street, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Spring Street in Los Angeles, California.

Spring Street is a storied corridor where Downtown's metropolitan character meets the city's nineteenth-century commercial center, an extraordinary concentration of early skyscrapers and the architectural legacy of a financial district once known as the Wall Street of the West.

Running through the Historic Core between Civic Center and the Fashion District, the urban corridor follows a predominantly north-south line across some of Downtown's oldest and most intensively developed blocks before continuing through the lower-rise cityscape south of the traditional commercial center. Northern stretches negotiate an irregular street pattern inherited from the earliest city grid before the roadway straightens into closely spaced blocks enclosed by masonry office buildings and former financial towers. Traveling south through the Historic Core brings increasingly continuous street walls, narrow sidewalks and successive elevations of stone, brick and terra cotta into view, with building heights maintaining an unusual consistency across several blocks. Farther south, the dense early twentieth-century skyline loosens as later construction, converted industrial properties and broader intersections alter the proportions of the street. The result is a corridor whose changing grid, concentrated vertical architecture, continuous historic facades and transition between successive Downtown districts make more than a century of Los Angeles urban growth physically legible.

What you should know about Spring Street.

Spring Street is best known for becoming the financial center of Los Angeles during the city's extraordinary early twentieth-century expansion. Its lineage reaches to Edward O. C. Ord's first official city map of 1849, when the street received the name Calle Primavera, associated in Los Angeles tradition with Trinidad de la Guerra, whom Ord called “mi primavera.” Commercial development moved steadily south from the nineteenth-century business center near Temple Street, and the blocks between Fourth and Seventh Streets underwent their decisive transformation between 1903 and 1931. John Parkinson's 1904 Braly Block, later called the Continental Building, rose 12 stories and 175 feet, becoming one of the city's first skyscrapers and its tallest office building for decades. Los Angeles imposed a 150-foot building-height limit in 1905, producing the remarkably consistent cornice lines that came to characterize the district as banks, insurance companies, investment houses and hotels filled the surrounding blocks. Financiers including Isaias W. Hellman and institutions tied to J.B. Lankershim and I.N. Van Nuys helped concentrate capital there as Beaux-Arts towers converted a formerly residential street into the western United States' most recognizable financial canyon. By the 1920s, Spring Street had earned its Wall Street of the West sobriquet, binding the physical rise of Downtown directly to the banks and investment firms financing the region's growth.

The district reached its architectural culmination during the final years before the Great Depression, when increasingly modern buildings altered the classical street. Construction began on the Los Angeles Stock Exchange at 618 South Spring Street in October 1929, only days before the Wall Street crash, yet the project continued and opened in 1931. Parkinson & Parkinson and Samuel E. Lunden created a Classical Moderne composition with a granite street facade, a setback twelve-story terra-cotta tower and massive fluted pilasters framing Salvatore Cartaino Scarpitta's reliefs Finance, Research and Disco and Production. Twelve-foot bronze entrance doors reinforced the intended impression of institutional permanence at precisely the moment financial confidence had collapsed nationally. The exchange eventually became part of the Pacific Stock Exchange and remained in the building until 1986, long after major banks and professional firms had begun migrating west toward Figueroa Street and Wilshire Boulevard during the 1960s. The architectural concentration survived that economic departure: the National Register listed the Spring Street Financial District in 1979, recognizing three blocks developed primarily with large bank and office buildings during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Spring Street consequently preserves the built form of Los Angeles finance across its entire early skyscraper era, from Beaux-Arts confidence through Moderne severity and the eventual westward migration of the institutions that created the district.

How to fold Spring Street into your trip.

Spring Street works as the anchor for a Downtown sequence connecting the city's first purpose-built fire station, the principal surviving institutional building of the original Chinese community and a Japanese American cultural center shaped by one of the twentieth century's most consequential sculptors.

Begin at Plaza Firehouse, where Los Angeles constructed its first city-owned building specifically intended to house firefighting personnel and equipment in 1884. Architect William Boring designed the brick structure and Dennis Hennessy built it between May and August, incorporating indoor horse stalls and a floor turntable that allowed equipment to reverse direction without backing the animals through the entrance. Firehouse No. 1 began operating that September, but a property dispute reached the California Supreme Court and ended with L.M. Bigelow and Griffin Johnston prevailing over the city in 1891. The station ceased firefighting operations when its lease expired in 1897, subsequently passing through uses as a saloon, boarding house, cigar store and poolroom before California acquired it in 1954 and restored it as part of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument. Continue to Chinese American Museum, occupying the 1890 Garnier Building, the oldest surviving structure directly associated with Los Angeles's original Chinese community. Philippe Garnier leased the building to Chinese American merchants before its completion, and its upper floors became home to institutions including the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Chinese American Citizens Alliance, Chinese Chamber of Commerce and schools and religious organizations. Sun Wing Wo Company operated there from 1891 until 1948 as a general merchandise business that also provided banking, postal and letter-writing services. Beginning in 1933, clearance for Union Station displaced the surrounding community, leaving the Garnier Building as the principal architectural survivor of the original district. Preservation efforts launched in 1984 eventually secured 7,200 square feet for the museum, whose development combined city investment, community fundraising and a California preservation grant before opening a permanent institution devoted to Chinese American history in Southern California. Conclude at Isamu Noguchi Plaza, part of the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center created after community leaders founded JACCC in 1972 to secure a permanent home for Japanese and Japanese American arts and culture. The campus opened in phases between 1980 and 1983, and Los Angeles-born sculptor Isamu Noguchi designed the plaza completed in 1983. Noguchi placed To the Issei at its center, joining two 12-foot basalt stones from Japan in a public work honoring the first generation of Japanese immigrants. The commission brought Noguchi back to his birthplace through a civic artwork conceived around communal gathering, and the surrounding cultural center emerged from decades of rebuilding after the wartime forced removal and incarceration that emptied Little Tokyo of its Japanese American population. The progression moves from nineteenth-century municipal institution building through the survival of a Chinese American community center and culminates in Noguchi's sculptural response to Japanese American cultural renewal, connecting three distinct chapters in the civic and immigrant history surrounding northern Spring Street.

MAKE IT REAL